By

John Wright

My circumstances allow me time to reflect on many aspects of life. Part of that activity is self-observation. I have learned that creating a book like Destiny or writing numerous articles to strip the veneer from misleading institutional proclamations and actions has its origin in me trying to make sense out of what is to me societal chaos and my effort to provide objective thinking and analysis, with a view towards improving human life.

That is my inner goal. I see much potential for humanity based on our accomplishments and many conflicts getting in the way of evolutionary progress, even to the point of our compromising our physical existence. I suppose it should have been obvious to me a long time ago that our history and our present, plus our lack of a holistic long term plan for our physical and social evolution, is a fundamental problem of our species that goes far beyond my proclamations regarding the Human Condition chapter within Destiny. I am concerned with the very real possibility that we may be and most likely are suicidal without intent and without appreciation of the possibility. This is not a new problem for humans.

The gut level question of relevance is this: How is it possible for a species of demonstrated ability to evolve successfully in scientific discovery and application to human quality of life to stay mired in the most primitive behaviors and beliefs, ones that keep us endlessly repeating the mistakes of our ancestors? In looking for an answer to that question, one might note that only a very tiny percentage of humans have ever been highly intelligent, so one explanation might be that trying to manage and coordinate the lives of the mass of humanity is and always has been a nearly impossible task for any leadership.

Why? The size and complexity of the problem grows as applied science allows for and supports the growth of human population and resource exploitation on a planet of limited environmental capacity. That was true in a local sense in ancient times as expanding populations in successful cultures exceeded the ability to feed those populations, particularly during periods of drought or flooding. Entire civilizations disappeared, like the Mayans. Today, the expanding population issue is only one of the types of large problems that are not officially acknowledged and publically addressed. Another is the attempt to force, globally, the mixing of diverse cultures with conflicting beliefs. I could add more examples, like the mindless destruction that is resulting from global warming, due to global failure to control carbon dioxide emissions and subsequently other contaminants like methane, but I am sure you understand my point. On one hand, if we never permitted any of the discoveries of science to be used to improve the quality of human life, then our global population would be so small, and our environmental impact on our planet so small, that our most serious issues today simply would not exist. Pandemics would be essentially impossible, though tigers might eat us. On the other hand, failure to identify and apply scientific discoveries would have yielded nothing but stasis, ergo, no evolution and no quality of life progress of any sort. Yes, I just said that lacking scientific progress that humanity would be in a state of stasis essentially equivalent to colonies of ants, merely somewhat more evolved than ants, and at that I may be wrong regarding which would be superior in survival.

The thoughts that I am and will be sharing in this article are rather obvious for anyone capable of intelligent reflection and curious about human history, current realities and especially human evolution into the distant future. My view is that our proclamations out of our history from varied times and places and people, as reflected in historical records and scrolls and books, and current continuance of ancient beliefs and practices, leads to the conclusions that 1) We were abominably ignorant in our past, such that people today should place little credence or value in the larger mistakes and proclamations of our distant ancestors, particularly when those social or religious proclamations run counter to what we have learned more recently from our applied physical sciences, and 2) We appear determined to misuse our scientific discoveries to destroy us and our planet, via ill-considered socialism, military weapons development and global business practices and their global pollution implications in developing economies. In short, we just can’t seem to get past playing “King of the Mountain.” The impacts of our deficient thinking about our physical environment and on our social stability now and into the future, are at this point in time ominous. If we do not act appropriately and in a timely manner now, then they will later be realized disasters.

I am too sensible to attribute these problems of humanity to any silly occult or religious explanation. Those idiocies are part of the problem, not part of the explanation for our inherent foibles and larger disasters, past, present and pending. What I do fear is that we exist unknowingly in an asylum. It is that scary hypothesis and subsequent fear on my part for our present and our future that is the primary reason for me writing this article. I am thus attempting to explore the causes and possibilities if my hypothesis, which clearly contains the premise that we exhibit mass insanity throughout history, has some basis for discovery of cause and useful direction for subsequent remedial actions.

I question my use of the term, mass insanity. Perhaps chronic ignorance would be a better choice, but the crux of the matter comes down to this: Any species that is sufficiently capable of perceiving its demise by virtue of its own actions and fails to take effective remedial action in a timely manner demonstrates, in my opinion, far more of the aspect of insanity than that of ignorance. If I am right in my thinking then there is nothing in the hierarchical power structure of our countries, in government or business or education or religion that can or will lead to a solution to our demise. I am thus saying that the patients of an asylum are constitutionally incapable of curing their deficiencies, regardless of their social position or career group within the total population of patients in the asylum. Perhaps that will make more sense to you. The issue is not necessarily completely black and white but to me it does not approximate equal shades of gray between insanity and ignorance. Denial of cause and effect in the face of obvious environmental proof of our absurd behaviors, and denial of personal responsibility to stop and to correct our errors on the part of leaders, both speak to insanity more than ignorance. The behavior of the leaders approximates the attitudes often associated with sports teams, as in: We lost today but there will always be another game and another season. Such thinking is disastrous when applied to environmental destruction or to global economic (population) development. Eleventh hour prognostications about extreme solutions to overwhelming problems will not carry the day. There is no magic.

In one sense the contributions of science and engineering make obvious the fact that we have put loaded guns into the hands of mentally deficient leaders and their utterly ignorant followers. Simply think of the roadside bombings in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. How is it that poor, poorly educated and violent citizens from those countries and surrounding countries can even get their hands on lethal explosives? How is it that we feel obliged to use drones to kill individuals in Pakistan, for we do not eliminate the religious fanatics/terrorists completely or even take steps to slow or stop the increase of populations of ignorant and dangerous people?

What we have instead are programs of economic sanctions that merely slow the progression of violence and, earlier in our history, we had such advances as the Green Revolution, which have, to be blunt, created and expanded the population related violence problems just identified. Genocide in Africa is another example of the products of applying our technology inappropriately. In other words, if we feed a million ignorant people, such that they are within a few generations ten million ignorant people, then just what is it that we have accomplished? Can those people be educated to rise above violence? Perhaps they can, but beyond that consideration is the more probable concern that they will continue to reproduce to excess relative to the ability to feed themselves, and our world is finite in ability to produce food and to accommodate environmental waste of all direct and indirect types. But underneath all of that is the question related to the asylum consideration, which is: What is the fundamental purpose for increasing global populations? Why are we doing that? Have you ever heard even one explanation for why that behavior operates in the best interests of humanity, or of our planet? Are we selling human meat to aliens? Yes, I know that statement is ridiculous.

When we look at areas of the world where different cultures have been forced to coexist, like the Balkans, what do we find? The answer is ethnic cleansing, otherwise known as premeditated murder, and all attempts to overcome cultural xenophobia in those environments, by governmental, economic, religious or educational efforts have failed multiple times through history. We appear to refuse to accept the reality that it is futile, very unwise and often lethal to the common people to mix conflicting cultures. Melting pot theories are totally absurd, and a perversion of the primary reason the United States allowed massive immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which was to obtain very cheap labor for construction and manufacturing and mining. Earlier we had slavery, and it should be obvious where that activity has taken us. More recently we are doing it again with the influx of Hispanics. We have been and are being Balkanized.

The human animal will tolerate Balkanization only under conditions of oppression or unstable temporary programs of socialism that, for the moment, eliminate much of the need to compete for food and housing through violence. How is it that we insist on creating those Balkan type environments elsewhere in Europe and in the United States? What have we seen in crime and social unrest in previously socially and culturally integrated populations? To be blunt we have, by analogy, infected our stable cultures/countries with debilitating and possibly lethal social diseases. To a culture from a different planet that happened to observe human societal evolution (devolution) we would be considered at the least, terminally stupid, and more likely insane. Why? Because we are destroying ourselves through irrational application of what appear to be humanitarian beliefs that turn out to be hopelessly naïve. At best it is a case of tunnel vision and subsequent oversight of reality. And at the worst it is a form of insanity, hidden beneath declared good intentions. By example, consider what would happen to you if you wanted to share your wealth with poor people in a ghetto and showed up with a wallet full of cash. How long do you think you would remain in control of your plan and your wealth? Would the people take your keys, your car, and then proceed to your home to add to their new found wealth?

Lest I appear to be picking on the socialists in favor of the capitalists let me make very clear that equal insanity has been demonstrated by those corporations responsible for developing economies in very high population countries via profit motivated seeking of low income labor. What those people have done is create very high expectations of now billions of people to have high standards of living that will result in the destruction of our physical environment, globally. I merely need to mention by example the extreme expansion of coal burning electrical generation facilities in China to make my point.

Corporate executives have too high a level of intelligence not to understand the downstream effects of their actions, so their career/social group is certifiably insane, or criminal, or both, for apart from consideration for the rest of humanity, they are destroying themselves. Yes, they are insane, not merely ignorant, not simply liars. They now have, by analogy, tons of gold on their ships, and they look at it with great satisfaction, while their ships are ready to sink in coming massive storms, with them onboard.

Do you grasp the criminal aspect of the corporations destroying the future for all the children yet to be born into the disaster that they have created and continue to expand? Since they obviously have intelligence they are criminally insane and they do belong in a real asylum where they cannot do further damage. The odds of that happening, however, are dismally small. The highest probability is that their behaviors will continue as they pervert governments, until such time as some other force stops them and the environmental disasters they have set in motion, whatever that force may be.

At this point I have described the problems in enough detail that it is time to move on to the solutions. One critical solution area that I wrote about in Destiny is wealth limits for individuals and corporations, not to mention governments. Another area was confining the domain of governments everywhere, such that they cannot develop or maintain such levels of power that the populations they govern are subject, continuously, to the prejudices of the wealthy who in fact now determine who will govern and what laws will be created or modified.

A beautiful example, indeed proof of that point, demonstrating the size and truth of the problem, is the recent April 2014 decision by the Supreme Court that corporate entities, political action committees, and individuals are all free to use their financial resources as they see fit to affect the outcomes of elections. If that process does not reek of oligarchy instead of representative democracy then I am the one who belongs in an asylum. This means the Supreme Court is useless to the beneficial evolution of the mass of humanity within the United States, and indirectly around the globe. There is no other valid conclusion to be made. They have polarized. They in no way represent the requirements of the Constitution of the United States, which is the only reason that court was created when the United States was founded. When perversion of intent reaches the highest levels of government, spanning all three branches of the federal government, and the wealthy by contributions determine who gets nominated and elected, and later legally compromised and subject to blackmail by accepting illegal funds for personal use, well, there is no solution to the problem using the process of voting. I leave it to you to figure out how to deal with that reality. Even stating the obvious conclusion subjects the individual, which in this case would be me, to prosecution and guaranteed imprisonment, if not death. As governmental control slips, as a result of erroneous prior policy decisions e.g. massive federal debt, punishments are expanded for those who disagree publically and vocally. Political Correctness muzzling policies are replaced with open threats to dissidents. First amendment rights of the individual are removed. Intolerance of conflicting opinions becomes, well, almost radically Islamic or Nazi like in nature.

Is it any wonder that I titled this article Asylum? No species can behave as we humans have behaved through our leaders in the past 150 years and expect to survive long term. Our species is powerful enough now to bring down the whole planet through our stupidity. We are so doing. We, particularly our business and governmental leaders, are thus insane and thus do belong in a real asylum. If we commoners, not to mention we scientists, continue to permit the destruction of our planet, and our personal economic lives, and thus the future of our children and the later future of all humanity, then we also belong in a real asylum.

Well, come to think of it, we are already there, aren’t we?